Balancing Act: Living (an Teaching) Through a Plague, Part 1
The self-serve coffee bar in my classroom at Washington High School. The decorated mugs were a gift from one of the Washington Literary Press staffs.
Tuesday, 11 February 2020
Last Friday, my decision to retire from teaching went public (on the Cedar Rapids school board agenda). I had already talked with my department chair, Adam, about this, and learned he was in the process of requesting a one-year leave of absence. After school on Thursday, I spoke with Julie, one of our instructional coaches and a close friend. Those conversations reminded me how bittersweet this decision is. I count Adam and Julie as two of my closest colleagues. As is true of so many of the teachers I’ve gotten to know over the last fifteen years, I have tremendous respect and admiration for them. I’ve witnessed teacher after teacher draw upon a seemingly bottomless well of empathy and compassion in order to connect with and support their students.
During my prep period on Thursday, I also stopped by to share my retirement plans with John, our principal. The conversation was as strange as many of our conversations have been. He asked if there was anything he could have done to keep me here, offering me an opening I gently stepped into. Already sixty-five years old, I had planned to teach one more year at most, but yes, his inability to address the everyday needs of his staff played a role in my decision. If he didn’t know that already, he’s even less astute than I had thought he was. At one point, he reminded me that his “laser focus” has been on helping our students to be academically successful. I reminded him that if that focus on students means that he ignores and fails to support his staff, to the point where their low morale affects their work in the classroom or persuades them to leave the profession, well, then he’s a pretty lousy principal. I don’t know if he heard what I had to say, or heard it but is incapable of changing himself.
Adam and I shared our news with the rest of the English department on Monday during lunch. After school, six of us gathered in the hallway and talked through our feelings. I’m trying to offer my colleagues some perspective: even though the two of us are veteran members of the department, they’ll forge on without us. If the school is able to hire someone like Tiphany, a first-year teacher who has been doing amazing work with her LA 10 classes and the Journalism program, they’ll be fine. After I went public with my retirement plans, during separate conversations with John, Julie, and Tiphany, their eyes welled up with tears. This surprised me. I don’t consider myself specially kind or thoughtful, but that reaction tells me I’ve had more of an impact on them than I might suppose.
Thursday, 13 February 2020
For teachers, snow days can be a gift. Yes, I’m annoyed that everything I wanted to do with my students today won’t happen, and my week’s lesson plans have been thrown into disarray. But I can let go of that. I’ve been reading Steven Levine’s book A Year to Live. A poet and teacher working in Buddhist traditions, Levine offers readers guidance in “how to live this year as if it were your last.” This snow day has allowed me to work on what he describes as a Life Review. I’ve started this chapter a couple times but keep setting the book aside. It’s a challenging and difficult step in the process. As I read the chapter, my mind dredged up memories, most of them weighed down by regret.
Levine eases us into this tough work, advising us to start with gratitude. My seventh-hour class knows they can get me off-track by nudging me to tell stories of my youthful adventures, hitchhiking stories about the kindness of strangers who helped me land on my feet when I was tripped up by adversity or my own foolishness. Levine then says we should turn to painful memories and offer forgiveness to those who’ve done us harm. For me, this is a fairly short list. Yes, I’ve experienced small offenses, but few that I’ve nursed over the years. One that stands out is the mistreatment I endured from my neighborhood pal Mark H. That I remember his name says something, since I haven’t seen him since high school, and we stopped hanging out by fifth or sixth grade. He would exploit my trust in order to make me an easier target for his verbal and physical bullying. As I write this, I imagine running into him some day and revealing this harm I’ve harbored. And in that imagined moment, he apologizes, admitting his youthful failings. Levine writes, “Forgiveness finishes unfinished business.”
The last step of the Life Review is the hardest – the litany of regrets. The Brett Kavanaugh hearings this past year caused me to look hard in the mirror. Ten years younger than me, he too attended an all-boys Jesuit college-prep high school. His breezy abuse of women (alleged, but I have no doubt) led me to recall how we talked about and treated women then. As Levine writes, “I discovered a youth full of distrust, self-centered gratification, and emotional dishonesty.” While a girlfriend and I waited in traffic after a concert at Blossom Music Center, my inebriation and blind lust led me to make advances despite her repeated requests that I stop. Something kept me from doing the worst, but the next morning, I was steeped in shame. And yet, I never apologized to her. When a girlfriend from Ohio University came to visit me in Kentucky, I was cold and rude, perhaps because I feared her visit signaled a level of commitment I wasn’t ready for, but that’s all bullshit. I never explained my feelings to her, in part because I barely understood them myself. I’ve searched the internet for her, wondering what she’s doing now, wishing I could reach out and apologize.
I wasn’t always the best father, particularly when the kids were young. I inherited my father’s impatience and anger, aspects of him I abhorred. Levine reminds us, “There are moments in the life review for all of us when the going gets so tough we have to keep remembering to come back to the heart the way a mountain climber returns to an oxygen mask.” In recent years, I’ve apologized to my kids. Their nonchalant responses indicated either their readiness to forgive me or the insignificance of those incidents.
Over the forty-five years that I knew Pat, I hurt her many times, but she was good at calling me on it and not letting me off the hook. Out of necessity, I learned to own my mistakes and apologize, to wait in the doghouse for however long was needed until she was ready to forgive me. And I became a better man because of those apologies. Levine writes, “It really isn’t the act of contrition that sets the mind at rest but the intention not to repeat actions that cause harm.” I’m grateful that over the last ten years of her life, from her first open-heart surgery to the final two years of her cancer, I was perhaps the best partner I ever was.
Levine quotes the Hindu epic Ramayana as a way to describe the Life Review: “It’s like something I dreamed once, long ago, far away.” This brought to mind the Grateful Dead song “Box of Rain” and Robert Hunter’s lyrics: “It’s all a dream we dreamed/ One afternoon long ago.” As I listened to the song and sang along with Jerry Garcia, I was ambushed by a powerful blend of regret, forgiveness, and joy, and my eyes welled up with tears. “Maybe you’re tired and broken/ Your tongue is twisted with words half spoken/ And thoughts unclear/ What do you want me to do/ To do for you to see you through/ A box of rain will ease the pain/ And love will see you through.”
Saturday, 22 February 2020
There are raccoons in my attic. I’ve been hearing them most of the winter, frequently insisting to myself I need to go up there and ask them to leave. But then I’d forget about that task until the next time I heard them pitter-pattering around. The only official access point is a hatch in the garage ceiling, although I’m guessing the raccoons have gained entry through a rotten board in the eaves I’ve been intending to replace. I envision a showdown. The raccoons are surely nesting, if they haven’t already given birth to a little brood. It’s not easy to be nimble up there because there’s no flooring. I wonder if this is a metaphor for something in terms of my Life Review. Are there memories scratching around in my head I’m not addressing? It can be awfully easy to be untruthful with myself, to admit the easy truths in order to conceal the darker ones.
I climbed up into the attic, expecting to find a raccoon family unwilling to be evicted from their home. Yelling out as I crawled over the rafter beams, hoping to scare off the animals, I discovered no critters. Sometimes, harboring fear or anxiety is worse than facing dark truths. I replaced the rotten board in the eaves, hoping to discourage future uninvited boarders.
Later, I went for a long run. Running is one of my favorite meditative practices. I become conscious of the cadence of my breathing, the alignment of my spine, my hips swiveling, my arms pumping, my hands relaxed in loose fists, my feet hitting the pavement, heel to toe. Sweat drips from my eyebrows, even in 50-degree weather. Eventually I find a rhythm and stop thinking about my body and go into my head. Afterwards my skin tingles. That sense of well-being lingers for hours.
Saturday, 1 March 2020
A beautiful first day of March. While folks stroll together or walk their dogs or bike the trail that connects Court Hill and McPherson parks or play basketball on the new court at McPherson Park, I take a midafternoon run. We know more winter lies ahead, but we want to revel in the warmth while it’s here.
I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s essays. In “Self-Respect,” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she writes: “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”
Saturday, 14 March 2020
Spring break in a time of pandemic. I’m trying to obey the quarantine, practicing “social distancing.” I just filled the bird feeders, and now I’m watching the nuthatches and chickadees and juncos and purple finches stopping by for snacks. I’ve been reading (and loving) Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, an entry or two each night at bedtime. I admire the book’s concept – a year-long commitment to write a daily essay praising and embracing some small wonder – and I’m charmed by his digressions and veerings. Last night, his “Joy Is Such a Human Madness” piece resonated with me. (The title is a quote from Zadie Smith’s essay “Joy.”) Gay is drawing a distinction and a connection between pleasure and joy (or delight). He proposes that joy is “being of and without at once.” Working from Smith’s essay, Gay offers this conundrum: “The intolerable makes life worthwhile.” Gay goes on to describe the joy of parenting as “terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of the bridge, very high up.” That is, we can’t truly experience joy without having experienced some profound sorrow – suffering or loss or pain or misery. It is the contrast that transforms a pleasurable moment into one of true joy.
I’ve been more aware of this feeling lately. I cultivate it and nurture it. I think it could carry me through most hard times. At school, during these dark days of struggling with the obstacles laid down by an ineffective principal, I’ve tried to spread joy among the students and my fellow teachers. Although High-Five Friday has been temporarily canceled because of the Covid-19 threat, I love joining other teachers at the school entrances to greet our kids and wish them a good day.
Sixteen months ago, my wife, Pat, died. I wonder if this explains my increased awareness of these moments. Losing her, that continued loss, the empty place that had been filled for almost forty years, makes me grateful for all the sweet moments that feel that much sweeter. I’m listening to Joni Mitchell’s album Blue. In the title song, she sings, “Everybody’s saying that hell’s the hippest way to go/ Well I don’t think so,/ But I’m gonna take a look around it though.” Would the joy of paradise mean as much to us without the dark alternative of hell?